Cheap pacemakers on offer for BPL patients

CALL IT big business with a heart. Asia?s sole cardiac pacemaker manufacturing company has offered to supply the life-saving equipment to the government at subsidised rates for below poverty line (BPL) patients.

CALL IT big business with a heart. Asia’s sole cardiac pacemaker manufacturing company has offered to supply the life-saving equipment to the government at subsidised rates for below poverty line (BPL) patients.

The firm, Indore-based Shree Pacetronix Ltd, has volunteered to offer indigenously manufactured pre-programmed pacemakers for as little as Rs 20,000 as against the Rs 40-50,000 that it costs for an imported device.

If cleared, the proposal would halve the cost of pacemaker implantation giving fresh lease of life to thousands of impoverished heart patients who cannot afford the lakh-odd rupees the procedure currently costs.

The eastern part of the country has a disproportionately high rate of cardiac patients, and heart patients abound even among the lower-middle class, ‘‘as they have the same dietary habits as the moneyed,’’ Sethi points out.

However, unlike the rich, the poor have no access to life-saving equipment when their hearts pack up. “Until we started providing pacemakers to WB, the poor were merely given medicines by doctors and sent back to their villages to die,” reveals Sethi.

Pacetronix promoter Dr Surendra Singh (now an NRI) was born and brought up in Madhya Pradesh, he says, adding that it was his desire to give something back to the State that prompted the subsidised pacemaker offer.

Stressing that low pacemaker costs in no way dictated a corresponding drop in quality, Sethi says that pacemakers his firm supplies are shorn of frills and ‘programmed to the max’ to benefit the recipients.

“How can you implant an expensive pacemaker in an 80-year-old lady and then justify it by saying it would allow her to run? How much running do the doctors expect her to do at her age, I’d like to know,” queries an irate Sethi.

“A doctor in, say, Athens, on the other hand, will unhesitatingly order one of our machines.